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Leslie Staub: CHURCH OF SOUL
This group of works consists of "beatified" musicians, writers, and politicians who are part of the heart and soul of the South. Images have included portraits of John Kennedy Toole, Zora Neale Hurston, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty and Walker Percy. Traditional Jazz figures have included Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke and Buddy Bolden. And political icons have not been overlooked: Huey and Earl Long, Jimmie Davis... and maybe even Edwin Edwards. And don't forget to feed your soul."
I was living in New England. I was thinking about home. I was eating red beans and rice. I was thinking about Louisiana. I was thinking about the need for a renewal in my spiritual and cultural life, the need for cultural connectedness in a world obsessed with alienation. I was listening to Clifton Chenier. After being lost in Clifton's blues for a good long time, I thought to myself: this is it, this is where the connection lies, in these moments - moments of transcendence, moments in and out of time lost in the landscape of a music born of the collective experience of my culture from my time and my place. Transcendent moments when here and now cease to matter, black and white are no longer relevant, alienation is replaced with something other-- moments of pure 20th century American bliss. As I opened my eyes, there in front of me was a picture of Clifton Chenier, King of Zydeco, wearing his crown on a hundred-dollar bill. That's when I saw it, the way to express it, this religious experience, rich as gold and shinin' like a diamond. I would go home to New Orleans and make this picture of Clifton Chenier, an icon of my cultural heritage, wearing his crown on a background of gold leaf inside a bejeweled and gilded frame, and I did. Since then I have made many more pictures and I call them "Icons from the Church of Soul"; it is a division of the Red Radio. Address: a bend in a long brown river down round the end of the twentieth century. Ain't Life Grand? Ain't it just divine?
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She calls these paintings "Icons
From The Church Of Soul". To quote Ms. Staub: "The
Church of Soul is a celebration of popular and indigenous culture,
of the spiritual in ordinary experience. It is a celebration
of the ability of music and the arts to help us transcend, if
only momentarily, personal, racial and cultural barriers. It
is an attempt to incorporate the currency of direct cultural
experience with what is sacred about being human-- right now,
right here, in the bend of the river down by the end of the twentieth
century. It is a beatification project."
